In morte veritas. Georgia Byrd clerks at a New Orleans department store. She defers pleasure: cooks gourmet meals, eats Lean Cuisine; likes a co-worker in silence; has savings, but hasn't left Louisiana. All that changes when a CT Scan discloses she has three weeks to live. She cashes her savings and heads to Europe's Grandhotel Pupp, where Chef Didier presides. She checks into the Presidential Suite, orders everything on the menu, snowboards, and comes to the attention of the chef and the hotel's powerful American guests: a Congressman, a Senator, a retail magnate, and his mistress. She has nothing to lose, so she tells them what she thinks. Will the truth set them free?

Marisa Ventura is a single mother born and bred in the boroughs of New York City, who works as a maid in a first-class Manhattan hotel. By a twist of fate and mistaken identity, Marisa meets Christopher Marshall, a handsome heir to a political dynasty, who believes that she is a guest at the hotel. Fate steps in and throws the unlikely pair together for one night. When Marisa's true identity is revealed, the two find that they are worlds apart, even though the distance separating them is just a subway ride between Manhattan and the Bronx.

Through a series of flashbacks, four young chinese women born in America and their respective mothers born in feudal China, explore their past. This search will help them understand their difficult mother/daughter relationship.

Wayne Wang's follow-up movie to Smoke presents a series of improvisational situations strung together to form a pastiche of Brooklyn's diverse ethnicity, offbeat humor, and essential humanity. Many of the same characters inhabiting Auggie Wren's Brooklyn Cigar Store in Smoke return here to expound on their philosophy of smoking, relationships, baseball, New York, and Belgian Waffles. Most of all, this is a movie about living life, off-the-cuff.

In 19th-century China, seven year old girls Snow Flower and Lily are matched as laotong - or "old sames" - bound together for eternity. Isolated by their families, they furtively communicate by taking turns writing in a secret language, nu shu, between the folds of a white silk fan. In a parallel story in present day Shanghai, the laotong's descendants, Nina and Sophia, struggle to maintain the intimacy of their own childhood friendship in the face of demanding careers, complicated love lives, and a relentlessly evolving Shanghai. Drawing on the lessons of the past, the two modern women must understand the story of their ancestral connection, hidden from them in the folds of the antique white silk fan, or risk losing one another forever.

Decisions and reality. Sasha is a young woman from Beijing, studying in Nebraska. She flies to the Bay Area and meets up with friends, including Boshen, a gay man who was the lover of Yang, a member of Beijing's Opera who got Sasha pregnant four months before. She's made an appointment at a clinic for the next day. Boshen thinks he, she, Yang, and the baby can be a family. After a contentious dinner, Sasha meets X, a call girl on her way to a party with older men. Sasha goes too. Later, Sasha asks X to travel the world with her. Reality awaits the next day. As the annual St. Stupid's Day Parade passes by, Boshen accompanies Sasha to the clinic. What will she decide?

The book is a collection of stories about life in modern China and the United States.